A Pain in My Chest

We live on the cutting edge of health practices, well my wife does, I live in a world where Pepsi is water. So in our household I am the one pushing us to be on the edge of technology and my wife is pushing us to be on the edge of health and medicine — God bless her, because I’d probably be comatose on nacho cheese by now if it wasn’t for my wife.

So when our daughter had trouble nursing, my wife went digging.

I cannot tell you how many things we tried, how many sleepless nights we both had, the level of crankiness in our home, and on and on. These past six months have been brutal on my wife and I — and our daughter Sloane. None of us have been sleeping, or eating as we should.

A couple of weeks ago my wife came across some new-to-her research about tongue ties, and suggested that our daughter had one. A day later my wife found out about lip-ties and we were both pretty sure that our daughter had this based on images of lip-ties we found.

It was at this point that my wife found out about Dr. Lawrence Kotlow. We found a dentist online that could revise both of these “ties” with a laser procedure (the cutting edge), so we packed up the car and headed to Canada to have something neither us knew about done to our daughter who wasn’t even half a year old yet.

We were stressed, tired, scared, and stuck in a car with a baby that was not happy about being in a car.

The surgeon/dentist that we found was kind. He didn’t tell us anything my wife hadn’t yet learned, we met him for all of ten minutes and then we left our daughter with him to have the procedure done.

We knew the wait wouldn’t be easy, and as we waited for the 10 minute surgery to be completed we were both beyond stressed, nervous, and hopeful. It seemed like an hour passed. We got the call to head back, and when we came back to our daughter, who was screaming, it wasn’t a pleasant sight.

She was in pain and not around anyone that she knew. She was scared. It was a terrible sight for any parent.

The one thing I didn’t fully understand going into this is that we must “stretch” her lip and tongue areas to prevent reattachment. This is basically keeping the wound from healing back together, and thus reopening the wound a few times a day — I think you can imagine how painful this must be. The first time we did this, in our hotel room, we both almost broke down into tears with our daughter.

Two weeks of three-times a day “stretches” went by. Our daughter was upset anytime she was on her back and our hands came near her mouth. It was truly sad.

We are now 3 weeks removed from her procedure and no longer have to do the stretches to her. She is healed, mentally and physically. Yet my wife and I still aren’t healed mentally from that stress.

We take solace in the fact that our daughter is now a happier person. She nurses very well. She sleeps much better. She cries less. She is less “fussy”. It’s hard to convey the difference in her, but it is night and day between how she was and how she is.

Causing her pain broke my heart, but, as it turns out, my wife was right (she usually is) and our daughter is better off for it.

Normally I wouldn’t post something like this here, but it turns out that this is a very common problem and almost no pediatricians know about it or how to treat it. When we looked there were but three doctors we found that did the revision with a laser, one in Vancouver BC, one in southern California and one in Albany, New York.

So I post this here in hopes that I am able to help at least one other person. The entire lip-tie/tongue-tie thing seemed silly to me at first, but the results speak for themselves and that’s all the proof I needed to be a believer.

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tl;dr

We live on the cutting edge of health practices, well my wife does, I live in a world where Pepsi is water. So in our household I am the one pushing us to be on the edge of technology and my wife is pushing us to be on the edge of health and medicine — […]